Not the Man I Used to Be
by LadyDivine91
Summary: Skating with his 13-year-old daughter, Blaine feels his age when he can't keep up with the her the way he used to. Klaine. Kurt H. Blaine A.


**Written using all of the Klaine Advent Drabble Challenge prompts from audience to winter.**

"Hurry up, Daddy! You're slowing down!"

Blaine watches his daring daughter zip away on her brand new skates, a giggling blur in her puffy pink jacket and matching pink jeans. She flies across the ice and into the crowd while a huffing and puffing Blaine tries his best to keep up. He breathes heavily, the frosty winter air filling his lungs to bursting with each inhale. Tracy Anderson-Hummel is a 13-year-old bundle of pure, unstoppable energy. She can stay awake till midnight and still wake up earlier than everyone the following morning, bright-eyed and ready to face the day. She runs where she's going every opportunity she gets when most people, even her friends, would rather walk. Chasing after his fair-skinned, blue-eyed, pixie princess, with no hope of catching up, Blaine feels like a big, grey blob. Her words repeat in his head in her sweet, sing-song soprano voice. _Slowing down_. No truer words were ever spoken. Well, out of the mouths of babes and all.

She zooms around the rink, coming up behind him and tagging him on the arm before he can even complete a lap.

" _Daddy_!"

"I know, sweetheart. I know," he pants, hands locked on his hips as he glides to a halt. "Just … give Daddy five minutes. Okay?"

"Awww, Daddy," Tracy grumbles with disappointment.

"You keep skating, baby. I'm just … I'm going to … check on your father … and your brother."

"Oh, alright," she says, skating off to the center of the ice, leaving her father to limp his way to the sidelines and over to his husband, cuddled underneath a thick, comfy blanket with their exhausted seven-year-old.

"Hello, love. Back so soon?"

"I need … to sit," Blaine groans, inching his way onto the bench, the dull, thudding pain in his hips keeping him from sitting any faster.

"I thought you have been," Kurt teases. "I've never seen you fall on your butt so many times. Aren't you the same man who skated circles around me at Bryant Park? You were even singing _White Christmas_ at the time."

"That was twenty years ago," Blaine reminds him. He sits up and massages his tailbone, sore from repeated impacts of his body on the unforgiving ice. "We were both _leisurely_ skating for about an hour, not racing down a middle schooler for three."

"She managed to wear Hepburn out," Kurt comments, adjusting the boy's knit cap down over his ears and kissing him on the crown of his sleepy head.

"That's the Hummel in her," Blaine says in a suggestive tone. "Wearing out the men in her life."

"Don't be creepy." Kurt chuckles. "But I'll take that as a compliment."

"Please do," Blaine says, moving on to rub the knot in his left calf.

"You know, you only have yourself to blame for all your sore joints."

Blaine looks at his husband, quirking a brow. "How do you figure?"

"Seven runs of Hedwig, Blaine? Jumping around a stage in platform heels, climbing over cars, making out with the audience – that'll wreak havoc on your knees. JCM warned you."

"I don't see how _making out_ with the audience ruined my knees," Blaine jokes. A flush cheeked Kurt simply rolls his eyes. "Besides, I wouldn't trade it for anything. In fact, I'd pick it up again when it came back to New York if I could, but …" Blaine looks at his hands in leather gloves massaging his leg through layers - jeans, a pair of thermals, and underneath, a special pair of compression socks he wears to help improve the circulation in his legs.

"But?" Kurt asks, the pause freezing over like the remains of last night's rain on the ground.

"You know … they wanted a _different_ Hedwig. Someone who could revive that image of a _younger_ rock 'n roller."

"Ah," Kurt says with a nod, catching wise to what his husband's moping about. On their last walk to Central Park with the kids, they'd caught sight of an ad on a Midtown bus for the _Hedwig_ tour, announcing the dates for its Broadway showing in the New Year. The eyes plastered across the side were of a man Kurt had seen doing an interview on _Good Morning America_. He has an impressive resume, and looks like a young Ezra Miller. Kurt's sure he's excellent in the part.

But the ad on the bus included some ignorant critic's ridiculous claim that he would usher in the age as the new and _improved_ Blaine Anderson.

Kurt had never wanted to punch a bus so much ever in his life.

To be honest, Kurt has never wanted to punch a bus, but this one is now on his list.

But Kurt did the next best thing. He called JCM, who had the ads pulled, with his deepest apologies. He told Kurt that these new ads had never passed by his desk for his approval. He figured that since he was in his seventies now, the theater didn't feel they had to run things by him as much anymore. He would never have signed off on anything that cast such a disparaging light on one of his most loyal and talented Hedwigs to date.

"You do realize that everything that reviewer wrote was complete and total bull," Kurt says, leaning his head on his husband's shoulder. "The Broadway universe doesn't need a _new and improved_ Blaine Anderson, because our _one and only_ Blaine Anderson is the best out there."

Blaine rests his cheek against his husband's hair. "You have to say supportive things like that," Blaine grumps. "We're married."

"First of all, no I don't," Kurt retaliates. "I think you may be forgetting the peanut butter chicken fiasco of three years ago."

"Oh yeah," Blaine says, managing a laugh. "You were pretty pissed at that."

" _You_ try cleaning burnt peanut butter off the bottom of an iron skillet! I had to trash the whole thing, and that was _after_ an hour of soaking in vinegar and scrubbing with steel wool."

Blaine snickers to himself remembering the hour Kurt spent muttering under his breath, cursing in French, while he scraped brown froth off the bottom of his favorite pan. Blaine had offered to replace it before Kurt tried to salvage it, but Kurt can be stubborn when he's trying to prove a point.

All was not lost, though. Blaine recorded Kurt on the sly. He plans on including it in their legacy video for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He almost can't wait for the day.

The look on Kurt's face will be _priceless_.

"The point is, I don't have to say anything just because we're married," Kurt continues, blissfully unaware. "I'm saying it because it's the truth … and so is this. Blaine, you're getting older …"

Blaine lifts his head, staring off sullenly into the blinding white landscape. "Gee. Thanks. That's not where I thought this was going."

"… but that's not necessarily a bad thing," Kurt finishes. "It doesn't mean that your time as Hedwig is over, either. Or any other role you want to play." Kurt straightens, turning his head to look at his husband watching their daughter try her hand at a scratch spin. She wobbles a bit, almost falls backward, but regains her balance and tries again. It's not a perfect spin when she finally gets the hang of it, but it's a start. "Our lives aren't a series of stops and starts," Kurt says. "It's one continuous journey. That journey hasn't come to an end yet. There might be lulls, but that doesn't mean you're not getting somewhere. You never know. You're next big break might be right around the corner." Kurt puts a hand on his husband's knee. "We're not teenagers anymore, but our lives aren't done, Blaine."

Blaine smiles. _Teenagers_. He remembers being a teenager. He remembers all of the energy he had back then.

He remembers everything that he and Kurt used to _do_ with that energy.

He can't wait till later when they put the kids to bed and they can relive some of those memories.

"Okay," Blaine says, putting a hand over Kurt's and kissing him on the forehead. "I'll accept that. Not a teenager, but also not dead."

"Yup," Kurt says. "Just somewhere in between.

Blaine shoots his husband a look that almost makes Kurt forget sleeping Hepburn and laugh out loud.

" _Daddy_!" Tracy calls, hands cupped to the sides of her mouth so she can be heard over the recorded music. "Aren't you done sitting yet?"

"Ugh …" Blaine sighs. "What am I going to do about Tracy? She wants me to go back on the ice, and I feel like my legs are going to fall off."

"Oh!" Kurt says, an idea popping into his brain that lights his face like a physical bulb over his head. "I have _just_ the thing."

"What?"

"We'll rent one of those." Kurt points straight ahead to a mother and father pushing a young girl, around age four or five, on a tacky orange plastic sleigh that looked, from shape alone, like it was supposed to be a porpoise. Scanning the rink, Blaine spots a few more families pushing kids in similar sleighs, some shaped like penguins, others like seals, none of them in anything close to realistic colors, but that's probably the point. They're meant to be seen.

"Okay," Blaine says. "I guess I can use one of those as a crutch, but I don't think she's going to let me push her in it."

"Of course, she won't." Kurt chuckles. "We'll have her push _you_. It'll be good practice for when she has to roll you around everywhere in a wheelchair."

"Oh, yeah. And what about _you_?"

"I gave up platform heels in high school, Blaine. My knees are fine."

Blaine narrows his eyes at Kurt, who's biting his lower lip, his cheeks dimpling, and glowers playfully.

"You're a cruel man, Kurt," Blaine says, standing from his seat and launching onto the ice after his daughter.

"It got your off your ass, didn't it?" Kurt mutters, cradling his son - the mirror image of his dapper, curly-haired father - close to his chest. Kurt watches Blaine go, watches him pick up their daughter and spin her around, and smiles, remembering further back in time: a daunting new school, a charming young man, and a staircase as white as the snow beneath his feet.


End file.
